


Where I Can't Follow

by the_musical_alchemist



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Royai - Freeform, fmab - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 20:54:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4681142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_musical_alchemist/pseuds/the_musical_alchemist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“<i>Stay with me</i>!” Riza shouts, astonishing herself with the iron in her voice. She can’t see him through the tears that haze her vision so she blinks them away, only for more to form. “Roy Mustang, you will <i>not</i> die! That’s an order!”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where I Can't Follow

**Author's Note:**

> This is a death fic, so please proceed with caution, or don't proceed if that isn't your thing. ;-;

The approaching assailant barely gets the opportunity to raise his gun before it flies out of his hand and clatters to the ground. He falls to his knees, clutching his now-bloodied fist to his chest, seething in pain.

Riza lowers her gun and turns away, averting her attention to her comrade. She could have given him a fatal blow had she wanted to. But when an attacker could be a potential lead, you don’t dispose of them without questioning. Best to neutralize the threat with as few casualties as possible.

“Fuery!” she shouts. “Are you alright?”

The Sergeant Major holds a gun to his chest, flattened against the warehouse’s outside wall. His body is tense, in a state of shock, maybe, from being held at gunpoint only moments before. Then his eyes slip from Riza’s gaze and fix beyond her. His chest hitches, and he shouts something Riza doesn’t hear over a gunshot’s deafening crack.

She whirls around and for a moment she swears she’s been struck. Her head fills with air and her vision spots with black. Cold dread pools in the center of her stomach and it travels up her spine and down to her trembling fingertips. For a second, she is fully convinced that she has fallen and the unforgiving ground has swallowed her whole.

But she remains on her feet, staring in abject horror as the Colonel falls to his knees with a gasp and crumples to the floor. She thinks she screams. Maybe his name or rank or an incoherent combination of sounds. It’s difficult to discern anything over the blood that pulses through her ears.

Somehow, she regains the ability to move and she rushes over, unceremoniously dropping to his side as her vision swims in and out of focus.

“Colonel!” she cries. She hears another gunshot. One of their men, she dimly notes. Otherwise there’s no way she’d still be alive after leaving herself so unguarded.

He grunts in response, keeling over and spitting a mouthful of blood onto the pavement. Riza’s body goes cold. She grips his arm, formalities be damned, and calls out for him again. Tears well in her eyes, a burning knot forming in her throat. Her voice shakes when she shouts his rank, desperate for any indication that he can hear her.  

His hand is pressed firmly to his side where dark crimson seeps in between the fingers of his ignition gloves. Though a more rational part of her knows it’s futile, she refuses to give into it. Despite the pool of blood that spreads underneath him and soaks through the knees of her uniform, sticky and warm.

“Sir,” she says, her voice breaking on the word. His breathing has grown shallow. Beneath her hand, the rise and fall of his frame is dreadfully fast.

Her tremulous fingers dig into the fabric of his uniform. Another gunshot sounds, and she hears Havoc’s obscured voice cut through the fog surrounding her brain. Fuery answers him and another shot goes off. She wouldn’t be able to truly hear them if she wanted to. It’s as if she’s trapped underwater and the surrounding world has been sealed off, barely meeting her senses in blurred fragments.

She watches the Colonel carefully. His bloodied lips part for small, ailing breaths. Far too softly, he manages, “Lieu...ten…” he trails off, his chest inflating with one long wheeze.

“Sir,” she says quickly, panic building in her chest. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a different scene plays. The ghost of it chills her to the bone, intertwining the memory of his warm arms enveloping her from an unbearably cold space. She recalls how his lips brushed over the top of her head when he buried his face into her hair. How tightly he’d held her against his shaking body. So much so that May Chang advised him to let up in fear of reopening her wound.

But she hadn’t cared. For the first time in too long, she felt safe. His racing heartbeat steadied her. His soft whispers anchored her soul to her body. For those few seconds, she was okay. More than okay. She was  _alive_.

He rolls onto his back, his gloved hand abortively resting over his wound. Against her better judgment, she grips him by both shoulders and pulls him so that his head rests on her lap. The gesture seems to relax him some. His eyes close, and the faintest smile touches his lips.

“Lieu--,” he begins, then screws his eyes shut as a shudder courses through him. Riza’s hands go to his face. She runs her thumb over his cheek, swallowing a sob that pushes against her throat.

“Riza,” he says, and it’s barely loud enough to be considered a whisper. His bleary, bloodshot eyes take her in. “Don’t…” he takes a breath, “follow.”

“ _Stay with me_!” she shouts, astonishing herself with the iron in her voice. She can’t see him through the tears that haze her vision so she blinks them away, only for more to form. “Roy Mustang, you will  _not die_! That’s an order!”

He closes his eyes again, his chest hitching with the chuckle that escapes it. There’s a certain irony in his adjutant giving him orders. It’s something he’d probably like to voice aloud if he had the strength.

Riza grits her teeth as realization morphs into crippling anguish. His face has gone ashen and pallid. There is very little life left in his lidded eyes. With a sob, she screams, “ _God damn it_!”

It is her job to protect him. If she hadn’t been distracted, if she’d protected Fuery a little faster, if she’d just  _turned the fuck around_  she could have saved him. Her moment of negligence was all that was necessary to singlehandedly disembowel all that was left of her world. Because what did she have to fight for without him? What was the point of all this?

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her tears drip onto his face, mingling with the blood she’d unknowingly streaked across his cheek. “I’m sorry, Colonel. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m--” she’s choked by an oncoming sob.

She brings her free hand to rest over his heart where his pulse flutters with such subtlety she wouldn’t have noted it had she not been deliberately searching. He groggily brings his bloodied hand to rest atop hers. His fingers twitch, as if to curl around hers. Without thinking, she peels away the wet and sticky ignition glove to weave her fingers through his.

“Izumi,” Roy whispers, brushing his thumb over hers. In between breaths, he manages, “Ling. Olivier. Vato. Elizabeth.”

“ _No_ ,” Riza says, squeezing his hand. She shakes her head. “You will not tell me that like those are your last words. These are  _not_  your last--”

“Riza,” he sighs, his chest going petrifyingly still for only a second before falling back into its steady, albeit slow, rhythm.

“I love you too,” she says in one desperate breath. Her fingers close more firmly between his. “You know that. We just have to wait a little longer. When you’re Fuhrer and things are different...”

Her words fall on deaf ears including her own. Who is she trying to delude? They both know better. It’s insulting for her to be pacifying him with flowery lies. The fact she refuses to touch is that he will never become Fuhrer and all their dreams, everything they’ve fought for up until now, will die alongside him.

“Riza,” he says. Though his voice is weak, something hot blazes through his next two words. “ _Don’t follow_.”

The dread inside of her spreads further, frosting over her bones like ice. She shakes her head and begs, “Don’t ask that of me.”

“ _That’s_  an order,” he says, squeezing his eyes closed, drawing in a tight breath. Riza feels something warm trickle past her thumb. She isn’t sure which of them the tears on his face belong to.

Mere blinks later, his hand goes slack in hers. Riza’s heart stills. His eyes are closed and though his lips remain parted, the life that once pulsed through him has gone quiet.

“No,” she whispers. Underneath their joined hands, there’s a hollowness that indicates his heart has stopped beating. Her face contorts, and before she can stop herself, she’s hunched over him, every living thing inside of her collapsing in on itself. She clutches his limp hand with a death grip and repeats the word, “No,” over and over and over again, as if it will make any difference or make this reality any less true.

 _I wasn’t ready_ , she thinks.  _Just one more minute. Give me one more minute_. There was so much she hadn’t gotten to say. They couldn’t leave it like this. He couldn’t leave  _her_  when there was still so much left unsaid.

She hears a strangled scream erupt in her ears and it’s only when her throat begins to ache that she realizes it’s her own. She feels someone’s hands on her shoulders. They say something to her, but her ears block it out. She brings Roy’s hand to her face and cries into his bloody palm, gasping and hiccuping with sobs.

“ _Lieutenant_!” the person says more firmly, and she finally recognizes it as Havoc. The grief is like its own flame, burning and decaying all that comprises her. Havoc continues speaking, but his voice only suffocates her.

“Get off of me,” she says, pressing Roy’s knuckles to her chin.

“Hawkeye--”

“I said get  _off_  of me!” She violently tears herself out of his grasp. She closes her eyes, where she’s back under Central for that sliver of a moment, in his arms, where she’s safe. She cries harder, the dead weight of Roy’s hand shaking against her face from how much her own tremulous grasp rattles it.

“I should have done something,” she says after a hard swallow that burns like sandpaper down her throat. “I was supposed to protect him.”

“Hawkeye, we had no idea that guy was hiding back there,” Havoc says. Riza hears a note of anguish in his voice, and it’s then that she realizes how difficult it must be for him to keep it together. “You saved Fuery’s life. Don’t blame yourself for this.”

Riza looks up. Havoc’s blue eyes swim with tears. He looks down at his fallen commander and swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing from the motion.

Hollowly, Riza asks, “Where are the gunmen?”

“The one who shot the Boss is dead.” Havoc’s hand balls into a fist. Riza notices he evades the word ‘killed.’ “The others are in military custody.”

She nods, closing her eyes, allowing fresh tears to roll down her cheeks. Havoc rises to his feet and offers Riza a hand, but she declines, dropping her gaze to her lap where Roy’s head still lay.

“We have to go,” Havoc says softly.

“Go without me.” Riza runs the pad of her bloodstained thumb over his cracked lips. When he was a teenager, he had this nasty habit of biting his thumb whenever he was deep in thought or trying to decipher some alchemic array. It’s one he left behind at the Academy, though whenever they were alone in the office after everyone had left, Riza sometimes caught him pressing his thumb to his lips, as if the gesture’s familiarity brought him comfort.

It was something small, but it had made her smile. Because despite all the horrors that had befallen them and how much they’d both changed, a part of him would always be the awkward young alchemist and she his master’s daughter. And beneath their skin, the skin of murderers, they were also just a boy and a girl. They were  _human_.

“Lieutenant?”

Riza recognizes Fuery’s voice but she doesn’t meet his eyes. He doesn’t thank her for saving his life or even offer consolation for the man in her arms. It dawns on her for the first time that she didn’t just lose Roy. Her team lost their Colonel. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, though if it’s to them or to Roy she isn’t sure.  _I’m sorry I took you away from them. I’m sorry I took_ him _away from you._

“It’s not your fault,” Breda says. His voice quivers and Riza cannot handle that. Her eyes squeeze shut so tightly that her head starts to throb.

“I’ll meet you at HQ,” she says, dismissing them. Her voice sounds exactly as brittle as she feels.

“We’re not leaving without you,” Havoc says. He studies her warily. She figures she knows why. After all, he’d been in the room back when Roy reprimanded her for giving up on her own life.

_Don’t follow._

Riza’s body trembles as an onslaught of emotions overtakes her. Viciously, she shakes her head and says, “Just go, Havoc.”

The body in her arms has gone so unbearably still. He looks like Roy. He smells like Roy. Just a few minutes ago, he was Roy.

“Hawkeye, please--”

“I am your superior,  _Second_  Lieutenant!” she shouts as tears flood her eyes. “I am giving you an order!”

“So report me, then!” he shoots back. “Go ahead, Hawkeye! Fucking court martial me for all I care! There’s no way in hell any one of us is going to leave you here alone with a broken heart and a loaded gun. Do you think we don’t know you by now?”

_Don’t follow._

“Lieutenant, I said  _go_!”

_Don’t follow._

“We can’t lose you!” Havoc yells. Grief mangles his voice. On the next word, it breaks. “We can’t lose both of you!”

_I can’t afford to lose you._

_Forgive me._

_Don’t follow._

_Don’t follow._

_Don’t follow._

Riza’s fingers dig into Roy’s shoulders. And she screams. She doesn’t know what exactly it is she yells at her comrades, all she knows is that the result is an ache in her throat and another of considerable agony that eats away at the inside of her chest.

_Don’t follow._

Her holstered gun is suddenly very heavy. She’d reach for it, but that would mean taking her hands off of the only thing keeping her above the surface of a sea of unmitigated grief. The moment she lets go, her surroundings will trickle back in. This will be too real. She’ll be alone.

_Don’t follow._

She leans forward and presses her lips to his forehead, but her face crumples before she gets the chance to leave a kiss.

_Izumi. Ling. Olivier. Vato. Elizabeth._

Her forehead presses against his. It’s slicked with blood. From the corner of her eye, she sees it’s stained her blond fringe.

_I.L.O.V.E_

Brutal sobs rack her body. Her knuckles have paled from how tightly she grips him. Why wasn’t she fast enough? How could she have been so careless? How could they have possibly survived so many unspeakable things only to be taken out by a god damn bullet behind a warehouse?

_Don’t follow._

_I’ll follow you into Hell._

Someone rubs her back and by the gentleness of it, she guesses it’s Fuery. She doesn’t push him away. She’s run out of the required strength to.

“Lieutenant,” he says with the tentativeness one might use to approach a wounded animal, “Please come with us.”

“Just one more minute,” she begs, refusing to look at him. Her nose buries into Roy’s hair. Matted with sweat, streaked with blood from her own fingers, but still his.

“Okay,” says Fuery. She hears Havoc sigh. Of relief, maybe. She hopes that’s what it is. She isn’t sure she can handle anyone’s sadness but her own. At least not right now.

_Don’t follow._

It was an order. He led and she followed. That was how it was supposed to be. So why can’t she bring herself to say yes?

“One more minute,” she repeats in a breathless whisper.

She hugs him to her, similarly to how he held her in the tunnels under Central. Neither Havoc, Breda, or Fuery says a word. Not about how inappropriate this is, or how this is the first time she’s ever let them see her cry. None of that matters anymore. Besides, she isn’t stupid and neither is her team. They’ve always known what they were to each other. It was never a secret, at least not a well kept one.

 _One more minute_ , she promises herself, swallowing the burning lump in her throat.  _Just one more minute._


End file.
